In what could be his final conference speech before the next election, Keir Starmer has set out his case for why voters should back Labour to run the country. Here are the key points he made:
The protester
Starmer was just a few words into his speech when he was confronted with a protester scattering glitter and shouting incoherently towards the microphone. It gave the Labour leader a chance to shed his jacket, brush himself off and deliver the well-judged line: “Protest or power, that is why we changed our party.” The contrast between the protester and the Labour leader who believes he was heading for power was so perfect that one observer joked it must have been staged.
Israel
The first standing ovation the Labour leader received was not something about tackling the climate crisis, building more houses or spending more on the NHS. It was for his insistence that “Israel must always have the right to defend her people”. Labour party officials could not have hoped for a better symbol of how much the party has changed since it was riven by accusations of antisemitism.
The pebble-dashed semi
Starmer was under pressure to show more of his own personality, to talk more about how he had come from a relatively humble background to become a successful barrister, director of public prosecutions and now Labour leader. He did not do much of that, but he did find a way to update some of his stock phrases to present them in a more lighthearted way. “I’m trying really hard not to mention the house that I grew up in again,” he said, to laughter. “But seriously, that pebble-dashed semi was everything to my family.”
An appeal to Tory voters
Starmer’s most pressing electoral challenge is to persuade people who voted Conservative in 2019 not just to abstain at the next election, but to switch to Labour. To that extent he made a direct appeal to Tory voters: Labour will fight for the union, will defend family life, will keep taxes down and will be pro-business. After the speech, Labour spinners sent out a series of congratulatory quotes from business, almost all of which came from the housing industry.
Bashing the Conservatives
The corollary of the above section was a series of often brutal attacks on Rishi Sunak and his party. These included the humorous, with Starmer saying that after Sunak’s year inside No 10, “I’m beginning to see why Liz Truss won”. But he also warned of a Tory party “that has so completely severed its relationship with the future, that is prepared to scorch the earth just to get at us – they will be dangerous”.
The scale of the task
A repeated refrain of recent Labour speeches, Starmer argued that as prime minister he would face a tougher task than Tony Blair, because as well as fixing a 1997-style decline in public services he also needed to channel Harold Wilson’s mission to modernise the economy in an era of change, and Clement Attlee’s 1945 imperative to build a new Britain “out of the trauma of collective sacrifice”. He added: “In 2024 it will have to be all three.”
The cost of living crisis
In one of the more personal sections, Starmer again touched on his own background to reminisce about meeting a woman who is a single mother while on a family holiday in the Lake District this year. He said the woman told him she was in “survival mode” due to financial pressures, with no scope to think about the future. Starmer added: “I could see the hurt in her eyes as she told me. That’s what this cost of living crisis does – it intrudes on the little things we love, whittles away at our joy.”
Climate mission
There were no major new policy announcements in the speech, but Starmer’s full-throated defence of Labour’s climate policies marked a change in tone. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has already scaled back the party’s promise to spend £28bn on green investment, while Starmer has insisted that Labour’s clean-air policies should not appear “on each and every Tory leaflet”. This had led some in the Labour party to believe that Starmer and Reeves might ditch their green plans altogether. Doing so would be much harder however after Tuesday’s speech.
